Bestseller of the New Millennium: A Better MP3 Player
Like a cassette tape set to fast forward, twenty-six years have passed since the events first covered in Part One of this essay. We're back in the USA following our tour of Japan, but the world is much different than where we left off. The year is now 2001, a tumultuous period probably better known for terrorism. During this year American terrorist Timothy McVeigh was executed in June, the World Trade Centre was destroyed by an Al-Qaida sponsored attack in September, and anthrax-laced letters were distributed in the American Midwest by October. In all, some 3,000 innocent civilians died during this time,Glazier, L. (September 12, 2008). Lost Lives Remembered During 9/11 Ceremony. The Online Rocket. Retrieved June 30, 2012, from http://www.theonlinerocket.com/news/lost-lives-remembered-during-9-11-ceremony-1.2333384. with the potential for even more, had the infamous "shoebomber" Richard Reid succeeded in his ill-intent in late December, at the very close of the year. But this is not an article on terrorism. Although "liberation" was a popular topic being discussed in the Americas during 2001, with regards to the Middle East, we are going to talk about another kind of liberation: portable audio. Already we've covered the analogue music revolution of the late seventies, as well as how the seeds of the mp3 file were sown in the mid-eighties with the compact disc. Now we will begin to see how two seemingly benign announcements from Apple Computer, a company just being waned off life support after nearly dying several times in the mid-nineties, affects the birth of the digital music revolution. That January, Frith, D. (2001, January 20). Rumours Rampant of Better iMac on the Way. The Australian. p. 52. a seemingly unimportant audio utility had been made available for free download on the Apple website, a program that, while initially Mac exclusive, allowed users to convert the contents of an entire music compact disc into a series of mp3s. It may come as a surprise to the reader today, that this "free utility" for CD conversion, initially swept over by the press and overlooked, had a name that would end up being very famous less than five years later: it was known as iTunes 1.0, and was merely the pretext for something much, much bigger. Because, come October, it would become known that iTunes was not just a trivial CD conversion and transfer program. It was also going to be the file-transfer interface for a new Apple hardware device that played music. As the US prepared to wage war in Afghanistan, Steve Jobs prepared the public for something else. With a short, and to-the-point keynote address, he ushered in the iPod. Taking Your Files With You: The First Mp3 Players Ever since the flop of the long ago forgotten, chest-mounted Astraltune, consumers had always wanted the smallest, lightest product available when it came to portable audio players, and made this preference known through their buying habits and brand selection. This probably helps explain the Japanese early triumph in the field, due to that country's mastery of miniaturization, and Chairman Morita's quest to satisfy such demand. However, since branching off into digital audio with the creation of the compact disc and associated players like the Discman in the mid-eighties, Japan's ritualistic process of constant shrinking its products, had suddenly found itself at an unlikely impasse. In creating the compact disc, a variety of choices had been made, choices that affected how many minutes of audio the medium would store, at what level of quality, with an intended total lack of audio compression to satisfy the quest of ever improving playback sound. All of these aspects in some form or another, had not one, but two benefactors: firstly the consumer, but also the record labels, who would have to be wooed into adopting the new standard for distribution. By producing an attractive new medium that could store the industry-average album length, single-sided (therefore eliminating the characteristic flip-action of both LPs and tape cassettes), the progression would be seen as a natural choice, and the attractiveness of the new format would also justify higher resale prices. These uncompromising technical standards came at a cost however: disc diameter. By insisting on zero compression and the ideal album length of approximately an hour, five inches was the smallest the disc could be. And once this standard was agreed upon by international regulators, who had the foresight of avoiding a replay of the VHS-or-Beta wars some years earlier, Editorial. (1984, November 26). Audio Disk Players Coming of Age. New York Times. p. D1. the CD was not going to shrink any time soon. Niche market spinoffs (no pun intended) like the 3-inch diameter Mini CD Single, were eventually developed by 1988, Mini CD Single. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini_CD_single. but these held such small amounts of raw data that they were largely unsuccessful with commercial record labels, and primarily used just for computer data storage. Sony, trying to overcome the 5-inch predicament, then tried experimenting with smaller, more-densely packed MiniDiscs or MDs, by the early nineties, but these, again, would prove to be another false start for the company. Interestingly, it should be noted that in domestic Japanese markets, both 3-inch Mini CDs and MiniDiscs saw lengthily periods of limited popularity as mediums for the release of music singles and EPs, before dying off in the early 2000s. As it were, Sony was running in the wrong direction: it naturally assumed all future portable audio players would rely on the acceptance of some kind of memory medium for content playback. In this mistaken quest, they were overlooking something quietly developing in Germany. Sacrificing Quality for Compactness The first signs that Japan was about to lose its lead in the portable audio race, came perhaps sometime in 1991, when Karlheinz Brandenburg, an engineer at the Fraunhofer Institute, designed a 12-to-1 ratio 12-to-1 means that the audio converted takes up twelve times less memory space than its pre-converted equivalent. digital audio compression code that became known as the mp3 format following its adoption by the Motion Pictures Expert Group (MPEG) as its third patented media codec. Nicholson, C. (2009, September). Digital Audio Player. Scientific American. p. 72. Initially, it's primary use was to convert the contents of existing CDs into relatively small computer files, for quicker transfer over the slow networks and dial-up modems of the era. Sound quality suffered as a result from the process, but the loss was considered negligible for the intended purpose. This "mp3" may have seemed fairly pointless in 1991 in a time when most PCs could do little more than beep in monophony, and thus, it escaped the pomp-and-ceremony of the CD's birth ten years earlier and remained relatively unknown by the general public for several years. By 1998 however, Fraser, S. (2005, December 16). Safe and Sound. Current Science. p. 8. the format began to show increasing potential when a South Korean company (and an American mail order distributor) marketed the world's first portable mp3 player, called the MPMan F10. Nicholson, C. (2009, September). Digital Audio Player. Scientific American. p. 72. The F10, may have been basic, packing little more than 32 megabytes of memory (a paltry one four-thousandth of the capacity of a contemporary iPod Classic) "One four-thousandth" is approximate. 32 megabytes, multipled 3,840 times equals 122,800 megabytes. Divide 122,800 megabytes by 1,024, the measurement of one gigabyte, and you get 120 gigabytes. So the MPMan F10, at 32 megabytes, holds 3,840 times less data than a 120 gigabyte iPod Classic. but it allowed you to take your mp3 files with you, all in the convenience of a disc-free, solid-state device which was totally skip-proof. While the F10 garnered press time around the world, massmarket adoption was severely limited by the fact that the product was being offered by a joint-venture between two until-then unheard of companies, SaeHan and Eiger Labs, and scantly advertised, in few places other than bootleg mp3 websites and tech magazines. Worse still, the other imitators that were quick to rise on the global scene, were virtually the same: all startup companies with no established professional reputation. Blackwell, G. (1998, July 02). MP3's Success Rests On Hardware Players. Toronto Star. Sony and the others remained curiously quiet on the portable digital media front at first, perhaps owing to the considerable controversy that mp3 files had quickly attracted through their ubiquitous use on file-sharing websites like Napster, just beginning to fall under crushing legal scrutiny. Also, early, more public efforts to produce a commercial grade mp3 player had been surprisingly halted by legal bodies, on the grounds that even making a device to hold mp3 files could be construed as unlawful. Boutin, P. (2001, December 18). Don’t Steal Music, Pretty Please. Salon.com Retrieved from http://www.salon.com/2001/12/18/dont_steal_music.. When at last the Japanese giant began to test the waters for producing its own flash-memory music player, it had since come to settle into a corporate mindset of creating brand-exclusive traits, in the form of connectors, memory types, and file formats. So rather than make a better mp3 player, Sony began to spend considerable time and money reinventing the wheel so to speak, trying to sidestep the mp3 altogether by developing its own proprietary, in-house codec called ATRAC. Although one purpose of developing ATRAC was for better audio quality, another important element at the time was to support early Digital Rights Management copyrighting efforts of the era. See also: ATRAC. This strategy, as only time would tell, was going nowhere fast. All things considered, what of the existing legacy equipment, the cassette Walkmans, CD Discmans, and MD MiniDisc players? By 1999, journalist's opinions were split, some reporting that DiscMans sales had outpaced the 20-year old Walkman, Doan, A., Godwin, J. (1999, October 04). Winding Down. Forbes. p. 56. while others felt that both the MiniDisc and mp3 showed considerable promise but remained unconvinced that tape cassettes were playing their death rattle, beliving them to be a contender for years to come. Jenish, D., Davies, T. (1999, August 30). The Walkman at 20. Maclean's. p. 10. No matter what, the overall view was that if mp3s were going to thrive as more than a grassroots contender, better hardware was needed. Enter Steve Jobs. A Sleeping Giant Awakens Apple had for a long time, suffered under poor leadership and murky corporate initiatives, almost vanishing in the mid-nineties despite widespread consumer admiration for the brand and all the potential it had demonstrated in the past. In 1997, before even the mp3 battles began to smoulder, Steve Jobs set about stoking the fires in his old venture, having just been brought back to the board following a thirteen year exile. The first steps his company took -- while revolutionary in their own right -- followed predictable guidelines, and dealt with revamping the traditional product offerings such as desktop and laptop computers, embarking on the catchy and colourful i'' series of ''iMac and iBook personal computers. Quickly though, other pet projects started to gestate, such as the Unix-based next-generation Apple operating system known as OS X, a revamped AppleWorks productivity suite, and then, as previously mentioned, the iTunes music management program. Jobs grasped the wisdom that the key to winning the corporate battle lay not with stubbornly fighting the PC-vs-Mac war, but realizing that the dawn of a new era was just beginning, where a greater variety of battles would be fought -- and could be won -- for the electronic accessories people carried in their pockets; their music players, the PDAs, the cellphones. And especially important, how these devices accessed the lifeblood of content found on the Internet. Stone, B. (2011, October 10). 1997-2011: The Return. Bloomberg Businessweek. pp. 36-42. Presumably, we focus mainly on the music player his company produced, before the gateway device that was and is the iPhone, united all of these devices into one product. PLAYBACK CONTROL << RW | FFWD >> References and Citations Category:Articles Category:The Rise of the iPod